At our last hackfest we had the cool idea to rent a house somewhere for a whole week. But we would need to establish how many people like the idea and would join us. The date for the hackfest is still open and would be sometime between May and September 2013. We currently have 4 options:

We rent a house in Greece for a week. From my research so far that would be quite cheap, approximately 150 GBP (~180 EUR or ~240 USD) per person for a week, when staying with 10 people.

We might stay for a week in the LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. That would be either extremely cheap or even free.

Traditional Hackfest: We can piggyback an existing conference as usual and meet there for an extended weekend. Everyone would need to find accommodation of his/her own (usually a hotel).

Traditional, but extended: Still piggybacking an existing conference, but meeting in a rented house nearby for a few days before the conference. That way hard-core developers can meet for a longer time and users can meet us at the conference.

i.e. "realistic":
-The first-ever planned WikiCamp was canceled ( see Community / User Meetings )
-One WikiCamp took place, 2010 in Hannover at the CeBIT fair.
-The next planned WikiCamp ( this weekend, 2013-02-01 - 2013-02-02 in Neuß, Germany ) was just canceled, due to lack of interest ( see Community / User Meetings ).

b)
So the time-intensive and expensive ideas,
as the planning of a 1-week event for programmers in Germany,
is that right for the ( German ) DokuWiki community ?!

c)
OPTION 5:
How about a virtual Hackfest ( with Pizza for own bill, at anybody's home ), for a weekend ?!

d)
While competitive CMS systems present itself on the Hannover CeBIT 2013 in a special hall and event ( see Community / User Meeting ), DokuWiki is not present at this event. This MIGHT have been the chance to do a Hackfast on the weekend "after" the Cebit ( i.e. Saturday last fair day, Sunday ). But this chance is gone...

e)
I just participated in a Hackathon of a local Web 2.0 company, with a "Document Hub" service, which released its API, for 2.5 days ( Friday evening - Sunday afternoon ). This was great, but there was also a financial interest ( to attract programmers to write a client for the service ), and the event happened "almost for free" in the office of the startup company.

So it was for NO COSTS for the participants ( besides traveling + accommodation "but as cheap as possible, not in a conference hotel" ), and for LOW COSTS for the organizer ( Pizza, ChilliCon Carne, breakfast, soft drinks, beer,..for 15-20 software developers )
Take this as example, how it MIGHT work.

f)
I don´t know anybody, especially no company, with a positive "financial interest" about DokuWiki, who/which is willing to sponsor such an event.
If you know, have a try...

g)
Don´t confuse a special place like London
with the plain country ( in Germany, UK,..).

Don´t confuse a Hackathon event "for all Wikis" or even "for all CMS systems" with a "Just DokuWiki" event - see the special event at the Hannover CeBIT Fair 2013, where CMS competitors are present, but DokuWiki not.

SMART:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria
DokuWiki is not the "leading edge" of CMS or Wikis, to be realistic... maybe it never was.
There is a reason for its existance ( I enjoy it, you enjoy it,.. ).. but thats it.

Sincerely
Rolf

This post was edited 5 times, last on 2013-01-27, 08:57 by hemmerling.

We are not necessarily looking for sponsors, although sponsors would obviously be nice and in the past we had one. We financed our last HackFests ourselves and it never was unrealistic, neither when piggybacking another event nor when we did it on our own. You might confuse a HackFest with a big event. It usually isn't, at least not in our case. For the last HackFests we were between 4-15 people. Thinking "big" like renting a house in Greece is actually not as big as you might think, because at least money-wise it would cost roughly the same as the HackFests we had before.
So, this thread and the poll is not so much about deciding if we will do a HackFest, because we're 100% sure of that. The core crowd will definitely be there. The question is a) how to attract more developers (we can do without, but the more, the better) and b) to find out what kind of venue those who will be coming prefer.
The only problem with the house-renting option is that you have to know for sure how many will be staying there.

Regarding "option 5", we have virtual meetings all the time, so I don't think that's an option. The main point of a HackFest is to meet each other in real life.

Regarding giving the option to attend for free, this has always been the case for our HackFests so far. "Only" travel and accommodation costs money (although a lot), but it would be completely free for local people, of course. If we go with the house-renting option, the only thing that would change money-wise is that it wouldn't be free for local people anymore.

the flight alone
Hannover - Athen ( and then you are not yet there at the hotel )
is about 300 EUR, or even more,

and for even cheap hotels, you can calculate 60 EUR/night, for cheapest offers, in Germany, - and probably also for Greek or any other western European country -
for accomodation,

PLUS the rental of the conference rooms, plus MORE EXPENSIVE food ( you don´t have a supermarket or Döner restaurant at the place of the event )

So Greek
300 EUR flight
300 EUR hotel for 5 nights

600 EUR

Its just that the LinuxHotel was an example,
driving by train from Hannover to Linuxhotel and back with early booking, is 44 EUR.

I know the calculation for "1 week with flight in Europe" from other kinds of offers, in my case I thought about taking a special event "1 week of speeches about fuel cells, at locations where you have to book a hotel room, in the hotel where the conference takes place, plus fight", though it was a sponsored event, I would have to pay full hotel and flight costs... after all, I did not apply for participation.

b)
So such an event is "just cheap" for the local people, who do not pay travel and accomodation.
E.G. the first WikiCamp, at Hannover, my hometown:

I got free CeBIT ticket ( quiet easy to get in the last few years )
tram + bus travel was included in the ticket
free conference rooms, sponsored by CeBIT
so ZERO costs for me.

c)
Don´t confuse with this "cheap flights" of Ryan-Air ect,
this won´t work mostly for specific events,

and don´t confuse with offers "1 week in Mallorca or Turkey for 100 EUR, or even free".,
this won´t work mostly for specific events,

d)
And you forget that you need people as participatns, who may easily get "holidays from your boss", at times they want - not very realsitic for the IT industry, especially not for freelancers ect., who don´t have ANY holidays if they have a contract,
and who have to cancel ANY holidays if they get a new contract...

I suppose that You know nothing about the DokuWiki people who might be interested to join such an event ( as I don´t know too ), about their busines and labour situation, the willing to spent 1000 EUR ( 600 EUR does not include food, ect. ) for a Hackfest week.

Sincerely
Rolf

This post was edited 3 times, last on 2013-01-27, 16:12 by hemmerling.

I don't think it is. I calculated everything with *real values* and then I usually didn't even take the cheapest but only the third-cheapest option or so. Granted, it might easily be a bit more expensive in the end (it's only an estimate after all), but I don't think the difference will be very high.

Quote by hemmerling:

the flight alone
Hannover - Athen ( and then you are not yet there at the hotel )
is about 300 EUR, or even more,

I found a lot of cheaper flights from Berlin to Athens in September. The first 50 results were all between 200 and 237 EUR. And I did include the price for getting from the airport to the house (car rental plus fuel). That's under "travel to venue".

Quote by hemmerling:

and for even cheap hotels, you can calculate 60 EUR/night, for cheapest offers, in Germany, - and probably also for Greek or any other western European country -
for accomodation,

PLUS the rental of the conference rooms, plus MORE EXPENSIVE food ( you don´t have a supermarket or Döner restaurant at the place of the event )

All of that is included in the 180 EUR per person for 6 nights (for Greece). And there are even cheaper options. We would *not* be staying at a *hotel*! A holiday home is much cheaper. We wouldn't need a conference room as those homes have big living rooms and kitchens. And supermarkets are usually not too far away. I looked at several places and they all had a lot of cheap options, e.g. villarenters.com, homeaway.co.uk, homelidays.co.uk and tripadvisor.co.uk.
The cost for the Linuxhotel is actually not even an estimate, those are the real prices we'd have to pay.

Quote by hemmerling:

So such an event is "just cheap" for the local people, who do not pay travel and accomodation.
E.G. the first WikiCamp, at Hannover, my hometown:

I got free CeBIT ticket ( quiet easy to get in the last few years )
tram + bus travel was included in the ticket
free conference rooms, sponsored by CeBIT
so ZERO costs for me.

Yes, that's true for all such "free" or "cheap" events. For you it's cheap to go to the CeBIT, for me other non-local people it's several hundred Euros.

Quote by hemmerling:

Don´t confuse with this "cheap flights" of Ryan-Air ect,
this won´t work mostly for specific events,

Why not? I used easyJet for all of our HackFests. Where do you see a problem?

Quote by hemmerling:

And you forget that you need people as participatns, who may easily get "holidays from your boss", at times they want - not very realsitic for the IT industry, especially not for freelancers ect., who don´t have ANY holidays if they have a contract,
and who have to cancel ANY holidays if they get a new contract...

That's why we are starting to plan *now* so that people can plan ahead and options are still cheap. This is the only big difference to earlier HackFests, as this would be a whole week. But in the past people have stayed a whole week anyway, although the Hackfest itself was only over 3 days or so.

Quote by hemmerling:

I suppose that You know nothing about the DokuWiki people who might be interested to join such an event ( as I don´t know too ), about their busines and labour situation, the willing to spent 1000 EUR ( 600 EUR does not include food, ect. ) for a Hackfest week.

As I said before, we had quite a few HackFests before and developers had already been willing to pay hundreds of Euros for it. So, I don't think why roughly 200 EUR more than usual would make a difference. To some people, yes, but for most people spending a whole week is a bigger issue than spending the money.

You also shouldn't forget that this "rent a house for a week" idea doesn't come out of the blue but was discussed at our last HackFest. And everybody there liked the idea a lot. I am quite confident that we will get a minimum of 5 people interested.

g)
Don´t confuse a special place like London
with the plain country ( in Germany, UK,..).

While London is definitely a great city at the last Hackfest in London the majority of the attendants were not from London.

At least from my feeling at the Hackfest in Zürich we had the largest amount of people who were from the region around the event (but region in a larger sense).

Quote by hemmerling:

Don´t confuse a Hackathon event "for all Wikis" or even "for all CMS systems" with a "Just DokuWiki" event - see the special event at the Hannover CeBIT Fair 2013, where CMS competitors are present, but DokuWiki not.

I don't think a Hackathon for all Wikis or all CMS systems makes that much sense. Among wiki developers there might be some common areas where we can learn from each other but at least at previous events like the two Wikifests in Berlin we had the feeling that most of the time (apart from the social parts like eating) we were just sharing the location but not really working together.

Quote by hemmerling:

SMART:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria
DokuWiki is not the "leading edge" of CMS or Wikis, to be realistic... maybe it never was.
There is a reason for its existance ( I enjoy it, you enjoy it,.. ).. but thats it.

That's true, that's why we are not planning a big conference with several hundred people in many countries (like WordCamps for Wordpress) but a developer meetup at a place of which we know that it is in an acceptable travelling distance for at least a part of the DokuWiki developers (and yes, we know each other).

Why not? I used easyJet for all of our HackFests. Where do you see a problem?

a) Such airlines do not offer reliable service, in comparison to a train: You can be shure that at least SOME of the Hackfest participants will be faced that they "can´t take the cheap flight as expected", due to
- missing capacity ( no seats )
- does not fly at the needed days
- does not fly from next to the living place, does not fly next to the conference location

b)
E.g. London: The travel by train from the "London" airport to REAL London is more expensive than the flight from a German airport to "London"

c)
Cheap airplanes even don´t fly from many major (German) airports, but from minor ( German ) airports, so you have to travel to exotic locations sometimes even without railway station, or the costs with railway to come to the exotic place are even highter than the flight costs.

With Hannover as hometown, I even have luck that SOME cheap flights start here, BUT
The cheap airport for Frankfurt ist NOT Frankfurt but Hanau.
The cheap airport for Hamburg is Lübeck.
The cheap airport for Bielefeld is Paderborn.
The cheap airport for Berlin is NOT in Berlin, but a former military airport in Brandenburg...
and so on..

Same with targets: if the REAL targets of the airplanes are NOT next to conference location, you have much extra traveling costs...

d)
In 2008 I wanted to travel to Graz, Austria ( second-biggest town in Austria, behind Vienna )http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graz.
It was impossible to take a flight, especially no cheap flight,
as (at that time) Graz was not target of cheap flights ( I am not even shure if they have an airport at all ), especially not of direct conections from my hometown Hannover.

And "taking train plus flight" does not work either,
as planes don´t wait for trains, and vice versa,
with fixed booking of trains and planes you come easily in a situation where you can´t continue traveling with your paid tickets, as you did not reach the only ( paid ) connection...
on my last railway journey to Stuttgart last autumn, I met a guy with a "cheap" plane ticket, but due to a 2-hours train delay, probably he missed his flight and so a 800 EUR value of hotel + flight tickets...

e)
Cheap railway tickets don´t become much more expensive if you double the distance, within Germany .
So flight + train is usually more expensive than "just train".

Sincerely
Rolf

This post was edited 2 times, last on 2013-01-28, 11:19 by hemmerling.

I don't think a Hackathon for all Wikis or all CMS systems makes that much sense. Among wiki developers there might be some common areas where we can learn from each other but at least at previous events like the two Wikifests in Berlin we had the feeling that most of the time (apart from the social parts like eating) we were just sharing the location but not really working together.

Absolutely right.. but that's an argument against a specific just-DokuWiki Hackfest,
as even 2 of three just-Dokuwiki German WikiCamps http://wikicamp.mixxt.org/
were canceled....

So there MIGHT be enough people to found a Wikifest or Barcamp about "all Wikis" or even about "all Web CMS", but this does not mean that there is sufficient interest in a just-DokuWiki event...

So there MIGHT be enough people to found a Wikifest or Barcamp about "all Wikis" or even about "all Web CMS", but this does not mean that there is sufficient interest in a just-DokuWiki event...

I'm writing this for the third time now: There have been several successful just-DokuWiki HackFests already. So, whatever you're saying in that respect doesn't make any sense to anyone who attended a DokuWiki HackFest before. We can be 100% sure there will be enough interest, because there has been enough interest in the past couple of years already. See https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:hackfest

On the Doodle page someone mentions that it'd be possible to sleep on the conference room floor... is that an option?! hehe.. no no, I'm not going to make it this year. But next year I'd love to! I'll get organised earlier...